With increasing development and growth of high technology industries, people often interchange business cards in many instances. Conventionally, the business cards are collected in a business card book. After the business cards are accumulated to a large amount, the basic information associated with the business cards is manually searched. This manual searching approach is very troublesome. In today's electronic and digitalized generation, the images of the business cards are scanned and the image data are immediately recognized or filed by associated software. In order to quickly search the basic information in the further, the basic information associated with the business cards are usually filed and sorted.
Generally, two types of scanning apparatuses, i.e. a sheet-feeding scanning apparatus and an exclusive business card scanner, are used to scan images of business cards. By using the sheet-feeding scanning apparatus, the business card is placed on a platform and then a scanning operation is performed. An example of the exclusive business card scanner is disclosed in for example in U.S. Pat. No. 5,604,640.
The sheet-feeding scanning apparatus or the exclusive business card scanner, however, can scan only a single business card at a time. Therefore, the process of using the sheet-feeding scanning apparatus or the exclusive business card scanner is troublesome and time-consuming.
Recently, an automatic document feeder is usually integrated into the scanning apparatus in order to successively scanning many documents at a time. The scanning apparatus having the automatic document feeder, however, can scan A4-sized or Letter-sized documents. In other words, the document having size similar to the business card fails to be transported by such a scanning apparatus.
Since A4-sized or Letter-sized documents are the most frequently used, the gap between the front and rear transfer roller assemblies of the automatic document feeder is designed to accommodate A4-sized or Letter-sized documents but. That is, these transfer roller assemblies cannot be used to transport the smaller-sized documents (e.g. the business cards).